Gaza bombardment by Israel

In Israel, there are Jews talking about applying a new "Final Solution" to the "Arab problem". In Gaza, there are Arabs cheering the Hamas rockets with cries of "death to the Jews". A wave of irrational hatred is spreading over the Middle East, in Israel, Palestine, Syria, Iraq. Capitalism has conjured up the forces of the netherworld, and only the world proletariat can stand in their way.

Whatever its specifics, strategies and rationales - and there are certainly plenty of those - the Israeli-Palestine conflict is first and foremost the expression of a decomposing capitalism that holds an enormous threat for the working class and the whole of humanity. This particular conflict, increasingly along with the whole geopolitical situation of the Middle East, represents the tendency towards greater militarism, imperialist war, instability and chaos. Its absurdity, intractability and irrationality perfectly sums up the future that this crisis-ridden system offers to us and the generations to follow.

Once again, Israeli jets and missiles have been pounding Gaza. In 2008, ‘Operation Cast Lead’ led to almost 1,500 deaths, the majority of them civilians, despite all the claims made about ‘surgical strikes’ against terrorist targets. The Gaza Strip is one of the most impoverished and densely populated areas in the world and it is absolutely impossible to separate ‘terrorist facilities’ from the residential areas that surround them. With all the sophisticated weapons at the Israelis’ disposal, the majority of causalities in the current campaign are also women, children, and the old.

Gaza is still being bombed and the Hamas rockets are still being fired, showing that nothing has been solved by this brutal, one-sided war: over 1300 dead, mostly civilians and foot-soldiers, thousands more wounded and traumatised; over 20,000 houses partly or totally destroyed.

Those attending the demonstrations against the recent massacres in Gaza, because they wanted to express their solidarity with the Palestinian people or with humanity in general, needed more than a warm coat, hat and scarf to participate. A strong constitution was also required to stomach what turned out to be an orgy of nationalism.

This article was originally published on Israel's
Indymedia site and on Libcom.org . It was written by a comrade in Israel who, despite being in an
extreme minority, felt the need to respond to the patriotic war fever sweeping
Israel/Palestine in the wake of the Israeli assault on Gaza.

After two years of strangling the economy of Gaza - blockading
fuel and medicines, preventing exports and stopping workers from leaving Gaza
to find work on the Israeli side of the border - after turning the whole of
Gaza into a vast prison camp, from which desperate Palestinians have already
tried to escape by breaking through the border into Egypt, Israel's military
machine is subjecting this densely populated, impoverished area to all the
savagery of a virtually continuous aerial bombardment.